Matt Stoller and Tim Wu stopped by the Virtually Speaking studio in Second Life to discuss net neutrality.
There's a podcast posted now, with a video clip to come a little later. I'm posting this diary to serve as a discussion thread for Net Neutrality, and the telecom industry, in general.
One of Matt's comments was that, unlike a lot of progressive issues, we've been successful at shifting the narrative framework. establishing the descriptor, which Tim may or may not coined, but certainly was the first person to publish a paper that used the term.
The telecoms tried to establish a competing framework, through spokespeople like ex-Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry. This competing framework suggested that the telecoms would be unwilling to introduce bandwidth without control over content, and that current bandwidth would be unaffected by the enhanced bandwidth the telecoms planned to provide in return for the ability to discriminate in favor of their content.
The analogy they used to make this case was describing the internet as a collection of tubes, and arguing that adding more tubes would not interfere with existing tubes. This analogy, ineptly repeated by Ted Stevens, was effectively laughed out of the public discourse because it was so easily refuted by the thousands of internet engineers that read the web.
Matt pointed out that this incident demonstrated to Washington that the traditional method of developing, and endlessly repeating, a series of inaccurate talking points may still work in the television environment, it doesn't work on the internet. An army of fact-checkers awaits any lobbyist with dishonest talking points, and widely read venues will publish takedowns of these lobbyists.
So a combination of a positive frame and the work of experts on the web have largely succeeded in presenting the public with the value of open networks.